I’m middle-aged and my nine-to-five work routine keeps the financial wolves at bay; as with most Americans, I’m dependent on every paycheck. Being fully aware of mankind’s global ecological overshoot definitely puts an extra twist into my daily outlook when I head off for work. How long will my job be around as the pressures of peak oil and climate change mount? Of course we’re all riding the crest of the largest bubble in history, i.e. human overpopulation, where enough people are added each day to fill a large city with every single inhabitant becoming a new source of pollution and CO2 emissions. This past year seems to be a real seminal point in the breakdown of modern agriculture with several major breadbasket regions getting hit hard by record drought such as California and Brazil. There is no adapting to this kind of extreme weather in which snowpack, seasonal rain showers, and aquifers dry up and then when moisture does come, it’s delivered in torrential floods. And yet a sea of hungry mouths continue to arrive each day. Very few of these new parents are aware of the inevitable mass starvation on the horizon. How could they know when unending economic growth is demanded by their governments, environmentalists and investigative journalists are treated as terrorists, and truth-tellers are silenced? So our predicament will be handled in the most ad hoc and chaotic manner, think Katrina or Fukushima. We were all born into this dysfunctional, irredeemable system, and there’s no escaping the long arm of industrial civilization…

“The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidates who reminded them most of themselves.”
~ Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

The gears of the corporate state continue to grind onward while the plastic people go about their artificial lives oblivious to the strange rattling in the engine compartment. There really is no “carefree living” these days while you wish you could ‘unknow’ the dark thoughts of the wicked that is coming. No one or no thing is coming to save us.

Per the optimal foraging theory, humans are only following basic biological urges by burning the most optimal and high EROEI energy sources available to them – fossil fuels. The situation is complicated further by all the numerous mental traps humans subconsciously employ to avoid uncomfortable truths. Infighting between vested interests jockying to protect their slice of the pie is yet another gremlin in the engine. I really find little comfort in the thought that no matter how much damage we humans exact on the environment, life will eventually return to the planet. This seems to absolve us from acting as the so-called sentient and wise beings we claim to be. We might as well drop the pretenses and acknowledge the self-inflicted damage wrought by our technocapitalism. Its insidious mechanisms are busy digging a mass grave for everyone:

Philosopher Peter Lamborn Wilson called it the Technopathocracy of modern society. This dehumanizing system we live under offers the illusion of choice while also inculcating into the populace its antisocial nature, for instance cutthroat competition as “normal” and “healthy”. What the psychopathic elite deem as positive values becomes normalized:

“[It] is the world’s fastest growing waste stream, rising by 3 to 5 per cent every year, due to the decreased lifespan of the average computer from six years to two,” says Wong.
“In countries such as Australia the disposal of e-waste in landfills generates a potent leachate, which has high concentrations of flame retardant chemicals and heavy metals. These can migrate through soils and groundwater and eventually reach people.”
Wong says developed countries often send e-waste to developing countries in Asia and Africa for recycling, taking advantage of these countries’ lower cost of labour and lower environmental regulation.
But, he says, in these countries e-waste is processed to remove precious materials such as gold, silver and platinum, under “extremely primitive conditions”, leading to extensive pollution of air, water, food and people.
“The toxic chemicals generated through open burning of e-waste include PCDD, PBDEs, PAHs, PCBs and heavy metals,” says Wong. “[These] have given rise to serious environmental contamination.”
“Some of these toxic chemicals are known to build up in fish especially, which may then be traded locally and around the world.”
Wong says that science has now clearly demonstrated the risk of these toxic chemicals being passed on to the next generation, while babies are still in the womb, or in their mother’s milk.
“At the same time these e-waste contaminated sites are extremely hard to clean up due to the complex chemical mixtures they contain,” he says.

E-waste is simply one more positive feedback loop in our technocapitalist system that is overwhelming the planet like plastic waste in the oceans and GHG’s in the atmosphere. Mathematician Eric Schechter succinctly explains a few major flaws in capitalism which guarantee our own death by ecocide if the system is allowed to continue on its course:

“We must overthrow the system before ecocide kills us all. And if we throw out the plutocracy without changing our culture, the culture will just generate a new plutocracy. All parts of the system are interconnected, so we must change every aspect of our lives — in effect, we are part of what we must overthrow; we must change ourselves.”

Some Major Flaws of Capitalism:

If we were all valued members of the economy, rising productivity would theoretically make us all affluent, but under capitalism, just the opposite happens. The benefits of increased productivity are pocketed by the handful of people who control the workplace — the owners, the management executives, etc. Workers are seen as expendable tools.

Market fundamentalists claim that everyone profits from a “voluntary trade,” because they exchange something they value less for something they value more. But it doesn’t really work out that way. The wealthy keep the much larger portion of the profit S-P, and the poor’s portion will be just barely enough for survival. The wealthy get wealthier, because they have the bargaining power and only engage in deals that make them wealthier; they decline any other deals.

Greed is built into the system. A corporation is compelled, both by competition and by its legal charter, to maximize profits by any means available, disregarding or even concealing harm to workers, consumers, and the rest of the world. Fines for breaking rules generally are smaller than the profits obtained from such misbehavior, and so such fines are simply viewed as a part of the normal cost of doing business. Any CEO who finds scruples is quickly fired and replaced. Externalized costs are omitted from our measurements and calculations. We are taught to see our interests as separate, and the well-being of the community is not the responsibility of anyone in particular. The commons gets privatized and plundered, and as a result the ecosystem is dying.

The accumulation of capital corrupts all levers of government. Once upon a time, some of us believed that the market could be regulated and kept moral by government. But we were mistaken — it’s inevitable that the wealthy will capture the government. After all, wealth can be used for influence.

So as long as the system stays intact, we’re all along for the suicide ride over the cliff. Certainly anyone who is half awake can see that despite all the Rio Earth Summits and talk of “going green” over the last several decades, our path to the graveyard is all but written in stone. The human species will snuff itself out with the help of a socio-economic ideology that all the brainwashed people worship.

Sit back and enjoy the ride…

“Capitalism has survived communism. Now, it eats away at itself.”
~ Charles Bukowski, The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors
Have Taken Over the Ship

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About xraymike79

I'm a social critic, political/cultural commentator and artist. The modern industrial world is on the cusp of great changes to our current unsustainable way of life. Most people are oblivious to the paradigm shift that will occur, but some are starting to awaken to the fact that the future will not resemble the halcyon days of the last half century in America as evidenced by the OWS movement. My objective is to highlight important news stories and find the truth that is hidden behind what Joe Bageant called the American Hologram.
www.collapseofindustrialcivilization.com

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125 thoughts on “Born into Dystopia”

Too powerful and too close to the truth for most of them ‘out there’, Mike.

The best kind of slave is a slave who refuses to recognise that he/she is a slave and is willing to sacrifice his/her life in defence of the slave-master’s right to own and exploit slaves.

Of course there are plenty of ‘slave-traders’ and ‘house niggers’ who recognise it is a massive slave camp but think environmental collapse doesn’t apply to them. Or they don’t think at all and just act without thinking.

Presumably we have to wait for the food rations to be cut several times in ‘developed’ nations before the masses wake up. Maybe they won’t wake up to their predicament till they are naked in the ‘shower room’ and the canister is discharging its deadly contents.

Where we go from here I have no idea. As we have previously discussed, there is no escape. (I’ve been looking for a way out since the 1970s and am still trapped).

If only people wanted to hear the truth – but so few do. Watching the shutters come down and the denial mechanisms kick in is a deeply unnerving experience. Ineluctable logic is met with a shrug of the shoulders or a change in the topic of conversation. So my life is now a charade, living and working in a dead paradigm that doesn’t know it’s dead.

Alienating, too. It is putting space between me and the people I care about, none of whom want to know. Once you’ve fully assimilated the tragedy of our predicament not much else is worth talking about… So, thank goodness for websites like this one.

Ooh, I hate the word “better” being used with a system that is causing our own demise. I suppose any alternative system would have to come with a Madison Avenue PR team in order to try and convince the somnambulant masses that their own best interests were at stake.

Actually when it dies off we all die off. We all go down with the ship. Think of it as a Doomsday machine. That is kind of the message of the web site? There is really only one possible salvation. About 6 billion people die off from disease very quickly. If this happens there is hope. I don’t say this lightly. My business is crunching numbers and I keep arriving back at the same place.

It all began so long ago, a specialist spear-maker producing a tool that could amplify the EROEI of the hunter, a one man factory paid in meat. Our cohesive tribal nature nurtured this evolution, the proximity of specialists tool-makers, tool-users and then those that recorded information. No cellular enclosure was necessary, only previously existing social behavior. But at that time, escaping the limits of the natural world was not questioned, only done. Those that did use tools, survived, and those that didn’t failed to meet their metabolic requirements. And now, after many iterations of specialization and complex tool making, after having eaten most of the fossil fuels, forests and soils we can see the end upon the horizon.

Often when a human begins to die, wastes build-up as the kidneys shut down, food is no longer ingested and amino acids, fats and sugars don’t circulate to the cells and eventually oxygen becomes scarce. Humans, within their analog technological structures, will have greater freedom to escape as civilization’s dying process begins. But if a human escapes to the outside, beyond the starving and waste strewn cities where water no longer flows and food no longer arrives, what are they to do with their specialized skills meant for a highly specialized existence? If they can arrive safely beyond civilization’s death throes, what will they find? An anemic body ravaged by technological cancer? Will humans attack like hydrolases released from rupturing lysosomes and lay waste to what remains as civilization crumbles?

I don’t buy the “we were evil from jump” argument. It is much too theological for me. The beginning of the end for me was the English enclosure movement, the charter of the Bank of England, and the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania. You could also argue that it was the scientific method that enabled the metasticisation of the horror. But then again, I don’t thing monarchical theocracy is a good idea either.

Whether we are born evil or merely succumb to it is both theological and philosophical in nature. As a matter of opinion, the question doesn’t really demand an answer. Nor does the precise date of the beginning of the end, as I’ve averred in the past. Either way to both of those questions, history has developed the way it has, and the results are, to say the least, tragic. Even planet-wide crises have occurred multiple times in the past, but so far as we know never with such dirty hands as our own.

I disagree. Growth and overshoot are directly attributable to fossil fuels. Food production being the limit that was overcome. Look at the human population timeline overlapped with the discovery and output of fossil fuels. It couldn’t be clearer than that. We are living in a slight bli

So human populations are constrained and enabled by available food resources like other animal populations? This is also the way I read the tea leaves, but there is an attractive lure to placing the blame elsewhere (one metaphor or another) or at some other junction in history. Maybe it’s psychological salve. I dunno. The appealing distraction of looking beyond the obvious is awfully hardy.

Capitalism is a disease, a serious one. It is attached to an organism, humans, which are also in the long run, a disease: our technological and intellectual cleverness far far outruns our wisdom. On a collective level we are simultaneously extraordinarily brilliant, able to save and pass along our technological smarts while always starting, individually, from scratch with regard to understanding what to do with that. The end result is a constant race to the communal grave. Other earlier civilizations did it, and we are doing it in spades.

How Motherboards Are Made (in 2004)

Without a doubt, motherboards are the most complex and essential part of the modern PC. Not only do they hold the chipsets that pass data from peripherals, drives and memory to the processor, they also provide slots and ports for all your other system components and the circuits through which all data must pass. Perhaps surprisingly then, motherboards get very little respect in the computing press as compared to other components. They are perpetually the team player and not the star of the show, and are generally priced as such.

With this in mind, it’s surprising to learn the amount of work and machinery involved in manufacturing a single motherboard. We’d vaguely imagined some sort of stamping process where all components are slapped onto the bare board in one step and soldered, before being boxed in a big room full of bored workers. Sure there’d have to be some testing, but how intense could it be?

Scroll through the article below to see the photos of the daunting amounts of materials (and hence supply chains) and technical precision needed to make a motherboard:

An interesting additional point is these components are made in ‘clean rooms’ with expensive calibrated vacuums and purifiers – if the power goes out even for a minute the entire factory needs to be rebuilt due to contamination w dust and other particles. I was shocked when i learned this (while exploring impacts of intermittent electricity). Intermittency is not a big deal if youre a farmer or laborer but with complicated silicon wafers, motherboards etc it is very important to have 100% power all the time.
Nice write up (again) alice

————————–

Robin Datta says:

For those who may be unaware of the magnitudes of the infrastructure needed:
A look into AMD’s CPU manufacturing plant in Dresden, Germany:

Motherboards? The least of our worries! Most nations have now lost practically all of the equipment and skills necessary to make a pair of leather shoes.

Contrary to popular belief, leather is not made by skinning and animal and hanging the hide in the sun for a few days to dry.

Traditional tanning involved soaking hides in lime pits for days or weeks (depending on the thickness of the hide), and then a lot of damned hard work removing degraded hair, fat and interfibrillary matter, followed by neutralisation of the alkalinity and months of soaking in tannins, usually by way of large pits containing materials extracted from relatively uncommon trees.

Rather complex machines were designed in the nineteenth century to split thick hide into workable thicknesses, and those were then processed using substances that are generally difficult to obtain theses days, such as sperm whale oil.

Chamois tanning involved use of fish oils. (Cod, if you can find any.)

In the twentieth century mineral tanning using chromium sulphate became commonplace because it was quicker and cheaper, and chrome-tanned leather has a greater resistance to heat than vegetable-tanned leather. Zambia and Khazakstan will not be easy to get to. And roasting the chorme ore in a high temperature furnace to generate sodium dichromate could prove problematical in the future.

Producing durable items from animal skins is one of the most complex, difficult and time consuming activities known the man.

When the globalised industrial system ‘goes under’ few people will have access to calcium oxide, sulphuric acid, basic chrome sulphate or chestnut extract, let alone the acrylic resins and polyurethanes used to finish items of leather,

On the other side of things, the mass-produced synthetic shoes that China churns out by the billion are totally dependent on the availability of resins derived from mineral oil,

Examine almost anything we take for granted and you discover a complex trail that is now totally dependent on mass-produced industrial chemicals and electricity, Indeed, such rudimentary substances as baking powder (sodium bicarbonate) will probably be generally unobtainable after say 2025.

I grant you it could be possible for Egyptians or Pakistanis to spin cotton by hand and weave it by hand: it’s been done before. Also silk, and wool, of course. However, the transition to fourteenth century living is likely to be ‘difficult’, to say the least, especially now that the commons that kept people reasonably well fed in the past have been so severely looted and polluted.

Whenever I get my doomer freak on, I come here. Usually, comfortably predictable, like an old pair of running shoes. I was pleasantly surprised to see the e-waste stuff. I have long gone on about how it is ecologically impossible to provide solar-wind power to 8 billion people. Your comment is deeply appreciated.

Capitalism has it’s flaws, but many of the things we are condemning it for here are actually not flaws in the social-economic system but the technological system driving it. That means many of these very real dangers can be fixed, which helps with overpopulation! I’ll leave you with what I say on my ‘Reduce’ page.

**********
7. Does IPAT doom us?

­IPAT is the classic formula that describes our total environmental IMPACT as:

IMPACT = Population * Affluence (consumption) * Technology

It came out in the 1970′s and was unique. For the first time we had a formula that showed how population growth could multiply environmental damage. In other words, if today’s world of 7 billion People times Affluence (first world consumption) times Technology (burning dirty fossil fuels) = today’s world of drying rivers, eroding farmlands, depleted fisheries, destroyed forests, and to top it all off dangerous climate change, then surely tomorrow’s world of 10 billion People is going to be even worse? Sadly, the good news in IPAT has been buried. Doomers have forced the IPAT formula to be associated with population growth always, always, ALWAYS bringing ecological catastrophe. But this sells the power of the formula short. Let me explain.

Any High School Maths kid will tell you that if a number in a multiplication series drops lower than one, that number obviously becomes a divider.

7 billion * 1 = 7 billion.

7 billion * 0.5 = 3.5 billion.

This is obvious. So just for illustration purposes (which is what IPAT is all about) I’m going to allocate some numbers. Let’s call 1 Person 1 unit of impact, and let’s also call a western lifestyle of Affluence another 1 unit of impact. So the 7 billion PEOPLE * 1 Affluence = 7 billion units of IMPACT.

But now we’ve got to account for Technology. One planet living calculators show that global warming is the single greatest threat to our planetary ecosystems: that it alone doubles all the other impacts put together. See the Carbon in blue below.

Because it more than doubles all the others, I’m going to give fossil fuel energy Technology a value of 2. Now let’s run the numbers to see what numbers we get for today’s ecocide:

IMPACT = 14 billion * 1 (Affluence) * 2 (fossil fuel Technology)

This is quickly killing our world and undermining our ability to feed ourselves and run this civilisation. This is when the doomer will chime in that 10 billion people = 20 BILLION units of impact, and that the United Nations warns that the world hits 10 Billion mid century, and that, as Hudson said in Aliens, “That’s game over, man!”

By 2050 the higher population of 10 billion people on earth would only be an IMPACT of 10 billion which is less today’s impact at 14 billion. And remember, 14 billion units of IMPACT is how we defined today’s dying world.

There are, of course, other limits to growth and dangers from a higher population. If I had my way we’d do everything on this page to prevent any population growth and maybe drop the global population backward towards 6 or 5 billion! The purpose of this exercise is not to argue for growth, but for hope, because it is hard to see how we can introduce a worldwide demographic transition before 2050.

But if fixing the “Energy T” reduces our IMPACT, we haven’t even touched on new recycling T’s and transport T’s and farming T’s and water T’s and city planning T’s and sewerage recovery T’s. With enough energy and enough time, we can do so much to slow and even reverse today’s negative impacts on the environment.

Indeed, Worldchanging imagines modern industrial ecosystems that restore the world instead of destroy it, that have ‘handprints’ of stewardship not ‘footprints’ of destruction. We can get there. We just have to get the legislation through as soon as possible. And we may just discover that a nuclear green world of 10 billion people is an awesome place to enjoy!

I see on your “about” page that your loves are sci-fi and fantasy, which aptly describes everything you have written here and on your blog. It’s interesting that you seem to have at least a rudimentary grasp of the various civilization ending crises we face, but for some reason your chosen method of coming to terms with that reality is to slip into extreme technological fantasy.

Far be it from me to discourage you, by all means follow your heart. I would just caution you not to expect anyone else who understands global ecological overshoot to be as susceptible to your particular brand of psychosis.

I especially enjoy the way you make extremely liberal use of italics and exclamation points in your blog posts. So emphatic! I can almost picture your arms flailing in the air, eyes wide with excitement, voice rising to a shriek as you hammer ever harder into my obviously uncomprehending brain how insanely great! and unbelievably simple! it will be to run industrial civilization on uranium from seawater for the next few hundred million years!

Don’t worry Eclipse, no need to wring your hands over how we’ll negotiate a “demographic transition”. I highly suspect nature will fix the population problem for us, in the time honoured way. Please reply soon as you comments are hysterical!

“nobody can save you but
yourself.
you will be put again and again
into nearly impossible
situations.
they will attempt again and again
through subterfuge, guise and
force
to make you submit, quit and/or die quietly
inside.

nobody can save you but
yourself
and it will be easy enough to fail
so very easily
but don’t, don’t, don’t.
just watch them.
listen to them.
do you want to be like that?
a faceless, mindless, heartless
being?
do you want to experience
death before death?

nobody can save you but
yourself
and you’re worth saving.
it’s a war not easily won
but if anything is worth winning then
this is it.

Well, it depends on your mindset. That last comment was more a matter of personal world-view with a bit of mild-life-crisis thrown in, and doesn’t really address the fact that many from ages past would find this a *Utopia*, not dystopia. We have clean drinking water and good enough nutrition and education and medicine and information and entertainment that previous generations would be truly envious of. But there are dangers as well. My career life took some unexpected twists and turns with family health issues impacting on various choices I have made. But they were my choices. I’m not earning what a lot of my mates are, but hey? I get home on time, see my kids, and am not so stressed I can’t sleep at night just from my job. It’s about choice. What I want to know is what does Charles Bukowski think would work better?

What you call a “fact” is nothing more than an assumption on your part. Sounds like because you and yours still have access to the basics and some extras that means everything is still OK. You have not been paying attention. If you were you would be stressed, very fucking stressed. If you care to know the truth you should put the techno- fantasies on pause for one day and do some research on the things you mentioned. Clean drinking water, food/ nutritional outlook, education/employment, and health care. Charles Bukowski doesn’t think anymore, he died in 1994.

I have been paying attention since 2004 when my son nearly died from Leukaemia and I became ‘peak oil aware.’ I was so freaked out about peak oil that even though I was acting as a full time carer, I was also leading an activist group that presented peak oil to the NSW minority parties. It was a frantic time.

It’s just that I acknowledge that technology we developed DECADES ago can solve many of our IPAT concerns, and reduce our total impact on the planet back into One World living. Indeed, Russia are already deploying the technology: breeder reactors (one due to go critical soon). They ‘eat’ nuclear waste. Various varieties of the breeder reactor could go online over the next decade/s, solving global warming and turning a 100,000 year nuclear waste storage ‘problem’ into a $30 trillion dollar energy ASSET that is so valuable precisely because today’s nuclear waste can run the world for 500 years!http://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/refuel/

Bukowski? What does Bukowski think works better? Bukowski thinks heavy drinking works better. And if you want lots of fine detail on picayune shit he’ll just pour himself another drink. Hit you over the head with the bottle if you get too annoying. Bukowski kept it simple.

I disagree. You are of course right. A medieval peasant may think he was in Utopia but that depends on where you put the peasant. Suburbia, highly likely but a ghetto?, down town Mexico city? Would he still think he’s in Utopia? The point is that we could all lead very comfortable stress free lives if we could control greed and our urge to reproduce. The whole world is becoming a slum. The point of this web site is we can see it’s coming. We know it’s happening. Any semi educated person could connect the dots, and yet they don’t, blinded by gadgets, crap TV and junk food. The medieval peasant will definitely find Dystopia everywhere in a few years time. And a few after that. I doubt he will find anybody. Capitalism is a self sustaining machine of destruction with no off button. Either we kill it or it kills us. Your comments on techno solutions are very common and are the usual human psychological response to an unpleasant situation. Simply ignore the facts. And the simply fact is this. Nothing replaces fossil fuels. 6 Billion people only exist because of oil. It’s not just about energy. The other major issues are the portability of the energy and food production. Like I keep saying over and over again. Any solution that ignores population is a pipe dream.

“The medieval peasant will definitely find Dystopia everywhere in a few years time. And a few after that.”
That’s a belief, not a reality yet. Yes there are threats unfolding exponentially, but some technologies can do so as well! France went from 7% nuclear to 70% nuclear in just 10 years. (As James Hansen points out). Boron powder can then be burned and later ‘de-rusted’ to replace oil. (See Hansen).

“Your comments on techno solutions are very common and are the usual human psychological response to an unpleasant situation. Simply ignore the facts.”
That’s a cheap logical error called Bulverism where you attempt to psychoanalyse why I am so wrong, rather than actually prove *that* I’m wrong in the first place! It’s not your fault: it’s a rather common logical error hung over from last century.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism

With enough clean energy, we can eventually green the deserts, feed ourselves, lower atmospheric carbon, clean the oceans, protect the forests, reform suburbia and tinker with various destructive aspects of capitalism. Indeed, while I’m a fan of baseload + dispatchable GenIV nuclear power (that feeds off nuclear waste, solving that problem as well!), it seems CSP is good enough to power seawater greenhouses that can grow fruit and veg anywhere there’s a desert by the sea! That’s food from desert + seawater + solar!http://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/green-deserts/

Free markets do some things well, and other things poorly. They need guidance. But we can get there!

The minute, unseen things are amassing and moving about freely now – the viruses, the bacteria, diseases that will accelerate the die-off. Particulates and radiation, microscopic toxins in the water (that isn’t filtered out – like blood pathogens from hospital waste when washed off the gloves of the surgeon and go right down the drain into the public water system), coal-ash and paper-making effluvia, pharmaceuticals, fracking waste-water, oil production by-products, farm run-off and more.

Air-borne gases like hydrogen sulfide, methane and smog polluting the air we breathe, volcanic ash and sulfuric gases, industrial smoke, smoke from fires of all kinds, car and truck exhaust, brake dust, all mixing in the wind and coming home to our lungs for “filtration.” Is it any wonder that sickness and diseases are and will continue to impact life going forward? Time to give up jogging.

“A new study from the U.S. Geological Survey – soon to be published in the journal Enviromental Toxicology and Chemistry – finds that Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide (technically known as “glyphosate”) and its toxic degradation byproduct AMPA were found in over 75% of all air and rain samples in Mississippi in 2007.”

and we recently read how the smog-filled air of Beijing is comparable to nuclear winter.

When the basics of life are toxic, just how far away from extinction are we?

My Aunt died a few weeks ago. She had pancreatic cancer, but while in the hospital getting chemo, she contracted antibiotic-resistant staph. 10 days in a coma on heavy pain meds before she passed. Really tough on my cousins. According to the CDC last year 2 million Americans had some type of antibiotic-resistant infection and at least 23,000 died. It’s not as bad in Canada, but happens as less money is available for healthcare?

It’s called the rise of the superbugs and they ( a few scientists that no one listens to) have been warning us for years. You have more chance now of dying of an unrelated infection than the reason you went to the hospitals in the first place. If you are in total preparedness mode then this book is essential “Herbal antibiotics – Buhner” . It’s not a quack book. Very much an eye opener but with solutions. Of course it gets worse. The rise of the superbugs refers mainly to bacteria. However this problem is also rapidly occurring with insects that infest our crops. They are becoming resistant to our pesticides. If you have every dealt with mealybugs you will know how serious this is. Just add it to the long list of capitalist inspired f&ckups. Mother nature is seriously planning our removal from this planet and who could blame her?

Terra Blight is a 55-minute documentary exploring America’s consumption of computers and the hazardous waste we create in pursuit of the latest technology.

6 minute excerpt…

Terra Blight traces the life cycle of computers from creation to disposal and juxtaposes the disparate worlds that have computers as their center. From a 13-year-old Ghanaian who smashes obsolete monitors to salvage copper to a 3,000-person video game party in Texas, Terra Blight examines the unseen realities of one of the most ubiquitous toxic wastes on our planet.

The film employs a style similar to Gimme Green(director’s prior film), whereby the audience encounters many dynamic characters and accesses the problem through subtle humor and identification with subjects on-screen. Shot in crisp HD, Terra Blight navigates surreal landscapes with a sensitive cinema vérité lens that conveys the unique point-of-view of each character.

Terra Blight examines the intricacies of American consumerism through the story of the computer. It exposes some of the harms of its existence, but it also celebrates the positive changes it has brought to us.

By the film’s end, the audience will never look at their computer the same way again.

Ana Paula Habib films in the Agbogbloshie dumpsite in Accra, Ghana.

Isaiah Attah, a 13-year-old boy, smashes a computer monitor with a rock so he can obtain the metal frame, which has value to local recyclers. Isaiah works in the dumpsite to make money for school.

WASHINGTON (IPS) – An estimated 400 million acres of farmland in the United States will likely change hands over the coming two decades as older farmers retire, even as new evidence indicates this land is being strongly pursued by private equity investors.

Mirroring a trend being experienced across the globe, this strengthening focus on agriculture-related investment by the private sector is already leading to a spike in U.S. farmland prices. Coupled with relatively weak federal policies, these rising prices are barring many young farmers from continuing or starting up small-scale agricultural operations of their own.

In the long term, critics say, this dynamic could speed up the already fast-consolidating U.S. food industry, with broad ramifications for both human and environmental health [[[not to mention economic and psychological and “spiritual” health]]].

***“When non-operators own farms, they tend to source out the oversight to management companies, leading in part to horrific conditions around labour and how we treat the land,” Anuradha Mittal, the executive director of the Oakland Institute, a U.S. watchdog group focusing on global large-scale land acquisitions, told IPS.***

***“They also reprioritise what commodities are grown on that land, based on what can yield the highest return. This is no longer necessarily about food at all, but rather is a way to reap financial profits. Unfortunately, that’s far removed from the central role that land ultimately plays in terms of climate change, growing hunger and the stability of the global economy.”***

In a new report released Tuesday, the Oakland Institute tracks rising interest from some of the financial industry’s largest players. Citing information from Freedom of Information Act requests, the group says this includes bank subsidiaries (the Swiss UBS Agrivest), pension funds (the U.S. TIAA-CREF) and other private equity interests (such as HAIG, a subsidiary of Canada’s largest insurance group).

“Today, enthusiasm for agriculture borders on speculative mania. Driven by everything from rising food prices to growing demand for biofuel, the financial sector is taking an interest in farmland as never before,” the report states.
___

“Driven by the same structural factors and perpetrated by many of the same investors, the corporate consolidation of agriculture is being felt just as strongly in Iowa and California as it is in the Philippines and Mozambique.”

As yet, the amount of U.S. land owned by private investors is thought to be relatively low. The report points to a 2011 industry estimate that large-scale investors at the time owned around one percent of U.S. farmland, worth between three five billion dollars.

Last year, however, another industry analyst put this figure at around 10 billion dollars, suggesting that the institutional share of farmland ownership is rising quickly.

“We’ve been seeing a decimation of the family farmer for a long time, but now these processes are accelerating,” Mittal says. “We need a tightening at the policy level before we’re swamped by these trends.”

Demographic collision

In the year after food prices suddenly rose in 2008, global speculation in land rose by some 200 percent. With the international financial meltdown coinciding almost simultaneously with this crisis, investors have increasingly viewed agricultural land as a relatively safe place to put their money amidst rising volatility.

In the United States, investors are particularly eyeing potential future returns from mineral prospecting, water rights and strengthening trends in meat consumption. U.S. farmland is also seen as globally desirable due to a combination of high-tech farming opportunities and lax regulations regarding the use of genetically modified crops.

As a result of this new interest, land prices in the United States have risen by an estimated 213 percent over the past decade. This could now play into two trends at once.

***Already, the United States is home to relatively low numbers of farmers, with the country famously home to more prisoners than full-time agriculturalists. But those who do continue to farm are also quickly aging.***

While federal agriculture officials are expected to offer updated demographic information within the coming week, the most recent statistics suggest that just 6 percent of farmers are under 35 of age. Further, some 70 percent of U.S. farmland is owned by people 65 years or older.

***“The older generation needs to cash out because they have no retirement funds, even as the new generation doesn’t have the capital to get into the kind of debt that [starting a farm] requires,” Severine von Tscharner Fleming, a farmer and co-founder of the Agrarian Trust, a group that helps new farmers access land, told IPS.***

“Today there is a huge number of older folks trying to decide what to do with their land, and in many places we don’t have many years to help them make that decision. So in that sense there’s an urgent need, and we don’t have many tools at the federal level to help.”

***For the most part, Fleming suggests, U.S. federal agriculture policy today is not aligned to the country’s best interests, instead pointing away from greater agricultural diversity, regional resilience and greater strengthened opportunity for rural economies. Nonetheless, she says that her organisation is encountering a surge of attention from young people that *want* to start their own farms.*** [emphasis added]

“Over the past seven years, we’ve had an explosion of interest in being trained as a farmer and entering the trade of agriculture, and this is very much related to the crises around the banks and the environment,” she says.

***“The problem we’re facing is not one in which nobody wants to farm, but rather the fact that the U.S. economy is structured in such a way that makes it really hard to start a farm in this country.”***

The current pace of emission has no corollary in the geological record. Based on best observations, the fastest CO2 increases in the past were during either the PETM extinction event of 55 million years ago or the Permian Extinction, or Great Dying, of 250 million years ago. During these periods, rapid rates of CO2 increase were observed at about .35 parts per million each year. The current pace is now six or seven times that seen during these dangerous geological epochs and expected rates of CO2 increase during this century could exceed 20 times that seen in the record.

It is worth noting that more than 32 billion tons of CO2 now go into the atmosphere each year and that this rate of emission alone is about 160 times that of volcanic emissions the world over. Total human carbon emissions in CO2 equivalence for all greenhouse gasses is now over 50 billion tons, or more than 200 times global volcanic emissions. Even an epic flood basalt on the order of that which appeared during the Permian Extinction couldn’t match the current pace of human emission.

LeGendre recommended Anglo-Saxon methods: “Pacify and civilize them if possible, and if not…exterminate them or otherwise deal with them as the United States and England have dealt with the barbarians.”

Not quite sure why that was directed to me.
Anyway I remember reading Grant Morrison’s Invisibles as it came out and thinking this is a very illuminating pastiche of how the world works. Including our fantasies of saving the day. Was looking at the old volumes the other day and decided it was simply journalism. The Filth is journalism too

The Deluzian control society is now the ultimate form of entertainment in America, as the pain of others, especially those considered disposable and powerless, is no longer an object of compassion, but one of ridicule and amusement. Pleasure loses its emancipatory possibilities and degenerates into a pathology in which misery is celebrated as a source of fun. High octane violence and human suffering are now considered consumer entertainment products designed to raise the collective pleasure quotient. Brute force and savage killing replayed over and over in the culture now function as part of an anti-immune system that turns the economy of genuine pleasure into a mode of sadism that saps democracy of any political substance and moral vitality, even as the body politic appears engaged in a process of cannibalizing its own young. It is perhaps not farfetched to imagine a reality TV show in which millions tune in to watch young kids being handcuffed, arrested, tried in the courts, and sent to juvenile detention centers. No society can make a claim to being a democracy as long as it defines itself through shared hatred and fears, rather than shared responsibilities. Needless to say, extreme violence is more than a spectacle for upping the pleasure quotient of those disengaged from politics, it is also part of a punishing machine that spends more on putting poor minorities in jail than educating them. As Michelle Alexander points out, “There are more African American adults under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.”

The science is very clear, and says we need an urgent u-turn. Economists say ‘accumulate, accumulate, Moses and the prophets!’6 As Naomi Klein’s recent piece put it, science is telling us to revolt. This seems to confirm a new twist on the old slogan, socialism or barbarism. For John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York:

Humanity cannot expect to reach 350ppm and avoid planetary climatic disaster except through a major global social transformation, in line with the greatest social revolutions in history.7

For Ivan Mészáros:

The uncomfortable truth of the matter is that if there is no future for a radical mass movement in our time, there will be no future for humanity (…) [because] the extermination of humanity is the ultimate concomitant of capital’s destructive course of development.8

I’ve been writing for many years about US-NATO efforts to militarily surround Russia. The oil-i-garchy wants to get ahold of the natural gas (the world’s largest supply) that sits on Russian territory. It also wants full control of the Arctic region now that climate change will make it possible to drill for oil there. Russia has a huge northern coastal border with the Arctic and thus stands in the way of western oil control.

Already the war drums are sounding after Russia moved more troops into Crimea to protect its Navy base and the large pro-Russian population in the region.

…We usually overlook the critical fact that not only does nature put food on our table, she also empties our bedpans. The biosphere cleans our waste. It always has and, if it hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here having images of bedpans run through our brains. Rain cleans pollution from our atmosphere. Rivers are magnificent at cleaning waste as they run to the oceans. Our oceans suck CO2 in massive tonnage from the atmosphere. Soil, the microbes and chemicals within it and the plants that grow from it, absorb and then clean waste in a variety of ways. It’s just another vital function of our biomass. But, here’s the thing. It’s a finite planet, remember? That means our biosphere has a finite limit to the amount of waste it can process. Once it reaches capacity, waste backs up, accumulates. We’re familiar enough with polluted rivers and lakes, polluted air. China is now hitting a major soil contamination problem, the result of massive industrial pollution of some really bad stuff like arsenic building up in soil to the point where crops are unfit for human consumption. We’ve got all sorts of this going on in just about every corner of the world, especially the heavily populated hot spots.

We’ve engineered a global cult of living large. The high priests mass in the financial districts and legislative assemblies of every major centre on the planet. They lead us in the worship of growth. If we have a problem they teach us that the solution lies in growth. Their liturgy is founded in 18th century neo-classical economics, 19th century industrialism and 20th century geo-politics. There you will find the faith, chapter and verse. That this might be madness almost never occurs to us.

Here’s the thing. China may zoom off the charts with 10% annual growth in GDP but we in the West target about 3% annual GDP growth. It’s compounded growth. We expect the current year to be 3% larger than the previous year. Now let’s run the math. As a scale let’s use a hypothetical adult lifetime of 50-years – 35 working years, 15 years of retirement. Let’s begin at Year 1 of lifetime 1. By the time lifetime 1 is over, at year 50, 3% annual GDP growth would mean the economy had grown 4.4 times larger overall. At the end of lifetime 2, the economy would have grown over 19 times larger than it was in Year 1. After lifetime 3, GDP would have swelled by 84 times. At the end of lifetime 4, Year 200, GDP would have grown 369 times what it had been in Year 1. Not 369 per cent larger. No, 36,900 per cent larger. 369 times larger. That would be reflected in commensurate massive increases in consumption of energy and other resources and massive increases in consumption of goods and services and massive increases in waste and pollution of all sorts. How do you squeeze all that growth into a finite world?

You do it by eating your seed corn, raiding the wine cellar and, eventually, you empty the pantry. What then? Well, at that point, your options are narrowed considerably. You start wondering what your neighbour might have left in their pantry. If you’re tribal, you might go raiding. Happens all the time. Eventually something has to give. Usually the strong take from the weak, the rich take from the poor. Hell, rich countries are already buying up the best farmland in food insecure countries like Somalia where we routinely have to provide famine relief. Go figure, eh?

This essay started with climate change. That morphed into a look at population and the approaching plague of the mega-middle class and then into rapacious excess consumption and finally into our addiction to growth and how that leads us to the edge of a cliff. See, they’re all connected.

Climate change is not a disease. It’s a symptom of the disease that underlies all of these other symptoms. That disease is the lethal and dysfunctional manner in which we, as a global civilization, have become organized – socially, economically and politically. We have crafted institutions and modes of interaction based on a bountiful supply of cheap energy and the remarkable advancements in technology and science. We have evolved into a civilization of “because we can” with scant regard to whether we should…

Ideas translate into words and words translate back into ideas. The unvarying litany of industrial civilization provides the words that enslave the mind. William James, father of American psychology said, “There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.” Look at them sitting in those cellular enclosures, doing their jobs, promoting the growth and nourishment of the cancer. They’ve been told to put on their suits and work hard, sell more, compete. They’ve been told how to lie and persuade. They will function within a metabolic system that will eventually, when their limited worth has been extracted, show them the door so the unborn souls of their fleeting, narcissistic lives can be reclaimed by an indifferent universe. Let’s get a “selfie” of that. Click. And now, it seems, there’s no way back, the entire planet is to become a burial ground for the metazoans that made the slow torturous climb beyond the primeval ooze. Is it too much to ask these ape bodies to expend the effort to become conscious and not just be trained like monkeys to perform repetitive technological tasks? But even if they did become conscious, wouldn’t they abandon this unforgiving knowledge and the responsibility it engenders to revel in the sunshine just one more day?

I’m working on an essay, but after watching people interact, listening to their exchanges, it becomes pretty clear that they are unreachable. My thesis is a distasteful one and not likely to be welcomed by anyone, so I just drop a comment here and there for anyone that may have an inkling of understanding. Even if those in policy making arenas truly understood, I’m afraid they would not attempt to reform the populace, but rather undercut it in some draconian and distasteful manner. And in a way my comments are little intellectual “selfies,” ego gratification, a larger and more detailed billboard exposure could be dangerous for ones health. Additionally, if your name becomes widely associated with hopelessness, doom, destruction and unhappiness in general, you may get the “Jack Kevorkian” treatment and be labeled “Dr. Death” and/or be shut down by whatever means necessary. The long established religious and financial ponzis hold the resources, are especially intractable and are likely to be reestablished in perpetuity until the base of the pyramid is so destitute, the earth so depleted, so as to preclude their existence.

James, this is one of the sites where your essay would find amendable ears. Regulars here are unsurprised by distasteful theses. In some respects, there is little left to say, yet we can scarcely stop posting and commenting. Go figger.

…Photographic evidence and first-person testimony confirms that on March 12, 2011 the ship was within two miles of Fukushima Dai’ichi as the reactors there began to melt and explode. In the midst of a snow storm, deck hands were enveloped in a warm cloud that came with a metallic taste.

Sailors testify that the Reagan’s 5,500-member crew was told over the ship’s intercom to avoid drinking or bathing in desalinized water drawn from a radioactive sea.

The huge carrier quickly ceased its humanitarian efforts and sailed 100 miles out to sea, where newly published internal Navy communications confirm it was still taking serious doses of radioactive fallout.

A wide range of ailments have been reported

Scores of sailors from the Reagan and other ships stationed nearby now report a wide range of ailments reminiscent of those documented downwind from atomic bomb tests in the Pacific and Nevada, and at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

Among the 81 plaintiffs in the federal class action are a sailor who was pregnant during the mission, and her ‘Baby A.G.’ born that October with multiple genetic mutations.

The US Navy knew

Officially, Tepco and the Navy say the dose levels were safe. But a stunning new report by an American scholar based in Tokyo confirms that Naval officers communicated about what they knew to be the serious irradiation of the Reagan.

Written by Kyle Cunningham and published in Japan Focus, “Mobilizing Nuclear Bias” describes the interplay between the U.S. and Japanese governments as Fukushima devolved into disaster.

Cunningham writes that transcribed conversations obtained through the Freedom of Information Act feature naval officials who acknowledge that even while 100 miles away from Fukushima, the Reagan’s readings are highly elevated.

[…]

Serious fallout was also apparently found on helicopters coming back from relief missions. One unnamed U.S. government expert is quoted in the Japan Focus article as saying:

“At 100 meters away it (the helicopter) was reading 4 sieverts per hour. That is an astronomical number and it told me, what that number means to me, a trained person, is there is no water on the reactor cores and they are just melting down, there is nothing containing the release of radioactivity. It is an unmitigated, unshielded number.”Confidential communication, Sept. 17, 2012.]

Tepco and the Navy contend the Reagan did not receive a high enough dose to warrant serious concern. But Japan, South Korea and Guam deemed the carrier too radioactive to enter their ports. Stock photographs show sailors working en masse to scrub the ship down.

It’s not getting any better

The $4.3 billion boat is now docked in San Diego. Critics question whether it belongs there at all. Attempts to decontaminate U.S. ships irradiated during the Pacific nuclear bombs tests from 1946-1963 proved fruitless. Hundreds of sailors were exposed to heavy doses of radiation, but some ships had to be sunk anyway.

Global concerns continue to rise about Fukushima’s on-going crises with liquid leaks, the troubled removal of radioactive fuel rods, the search for three missing melted cores, organized crime influence at the site and much more.

The flow of information has been seriously darkened by the pro-nuclear Abe Administration’s State Secrets Act, which imposes major penalties on those who might report what happens at Fukushima.

Sailors ‘barred’ from suing

But if this new evidence holds true, it means that the Navy knew the Ronald Reagan was being plastered with serious radioactive fallout and it casts the accident in a light even more sinister than previously believed.

The stricken sailors are barred from suing the Navy, and their case against Tepco will depend on a series of complex international challenges. But one thing is certain: neither they nor the global community have been getting anything near the full truth about Fukushima.

Nuclear opponents are often criticized for using the term “apocalypse” to describe the triple meltdown/quadruple-explosion/endless-radiation gusher reality at Fukushima.

But PBS has now penetrated where ordinary journalists may not tread—the interior of the most radioactive place on Earth. PBS reporter Miles O’Brien shows us for the first time some of the visual reality of what has actually happened to a six-reactor facility that has turned into a trillion-dollar catastrophe.

Or, as PBS puts it, the nuclear “apocalypse” along the coast of Japan, daily pouring 300 tons of lethal isotopes into our ocean eco-system. This brave and fascinating excursion into Fukushima’s innards features footage of the infamous Unit Four spent fuel pool, where Tokyo Electric is trying to bring down extremely radioactive fuel rods whose potential killing power is essentially unfathomable.

Given the “State Secrets Act” banning Japan’s citizens from criticizing the government, O’Brien’s footage may be the last we see inside Fukushima for quite some time. Despite 150,000 signatures delivered to the United Nations asking for a global takeover, Fukushima’s builders and mis-managers remain firmly in charge. In fact, the clean-up has become a major profit center for Tepco, which showed a multi-billion-dollar windfall in 2013 while putting the entire planet in peril.

One odd note: O’Brien shows footage of Lake Barrett, a former Nuclear Regulatory Commission functionary who was integral to the cover-up at Three Mile Island, where owners falsely denied for years that any fuel had melted. Barrett advocates dumping Fukushima’s tritium-laden water directly into the Pacific Ocean. Will he also pop up at nuclear power’s next “post-apocalyptic” nightmare?

…no matter how much money the government throws at the problem, pollution is almost certain to get worse. Most of the air pollution in and around Beijing is caused by power, steel, cement, and brick production. As highlighted by the Wall Street Journal (paywall) and research firm Gavekal Dragonomics, meeting the government’s pollution targets would require a 10% decrease in coal consumption over the next four years. In fact, coal consumption has been on the upswing, rising 2.5% last year even as authorities moved to improve the situation.

“…Although the crumbling towers and slouched characters are quite small, the installation itself spans approximately 65 by 42 feet, amounting to an impressively detailed world populated solely by balding men in grey suits. In constant states of confusion, the bewildered figures huddle around lamp posts, gaze cautiously atop rooftops and watch as their surroundings decay before their very eyes…”

“I’m assuming that you are in contact with Guy McPherson and/or Dave Wasdell (et al), and I (for one) would appreciate their feedback on the following data-points and arithmetic ‘analysis’ (see link below)in regard to the TOTAL radiative forcing produced by the three primary ‘greenhouse’ gasses as NOW in evidence. I’m a retired academic with a multi-disciplinary Ph.D. in the life sciences and a long-standing (40-year) interest in atmospheric physics, ecology and energetics (among other ‘claims to infamy’). Therefore, I’m also generally considered to be a “doomer” with strong ‘preference’ for a fast-crash scenario ASAP as being the only possible way that at least some eukaryote life-forms might yet survive the consequences of the manifold perturbations produced by ‘eco/suicidal simians’. Regrettably, I think that it’s far “too late” to ‘save’ anything that we would recognize as life on Earth, albeit we ‘misery monkeys’ will never accept, change, mitigate, realize, much less ‘see’ the comprehensive devastation we’ve wrought to the biosphere.

NOTE: The above blog/site is owned by a long-time friend of mine, who has graciously agreed to make this (my) arithmetic ‘rant’ available to those who are aware of this particular (private, to date) URL.
There’s MUCH more that I could share. However, at the juncture I’m primarily interested in ‘expert’ opinion(s), whether in support, refinement or refutation of the following (linked) calculations.

In the interim, I’ve discovered a calculation (formula) error in the provided spreadsheet and have also sourced more recent (higher) measurements for both CH4 and NOx.
But neither of these changes overturn the basic point, wherein radiative forcing due to increasing CH4 and NOx levels substantially overwhelms the forcing caused by CO2 directly (in isolation).

If ‘the experts’ generally concur with ‘this’ premise, then the topic of TOTAL radiative forcing (consequences) would, IMO, be one that should be discussed/disseminated via CoIC and/or Lifeboat Hour et al.

I’ve done this quickly but I think you will find it correct: let me know if it’s not.

You need to consider that the initial values for CO2 (290ppm) CH4 (750ppb) and NOx (270ppb) corresponded with a relatively steady state, with orbital factors associated with elliptical transition and wobble largely determining changes in overall heating, and there fore average temperature. Lower concentrations of than those would probably have resulted in a mini (or maxi) ice age.

So the important factor is the elevation of greenhouse gas concentrations and their relative forcing compared to the relative increase in heat loss as the temperature rises.

Yes, CO2 is about 40% higher than pre-industrial, so its warming effect is about 40% greater.

Atmospheric methane was starting to level out around 2007, but has increased significantly since then. The relative warming factor is somewhat in excess of 100 in the short term, but we can use the figure of 100 x CO2. 1750ppb = approximately 2ppm, so the relative forcing of methane is around 2 x 100 = 200ppm CO2 equivalent, giving a total CO2 equivalent of 400 + 200 = 600ppm for CO2 + CH4..

Using 300ppb and a relative forcing of 300 for NOx gives us 0.3 x 300 = about 100 ppm CO2 equivalent for atmospheric NOx.

That currently gives a total CO2 equivalence of around 700ppm CO2, approximately twice the pre-industrial level of warming.

That gives us no cause for complacency because a lot of warming results from water vapour. Whilst water vapour can never be a primary forcing agent (because it condenses or freezes), water vapour will contribute substantially to warming cause by primary drivers. And the warmer it gets, the more water vapour will be generated.

Not considered in you analysis is the fact that oceans have been absorbing anthropogenic CO2 for 200 years and have been reducing the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere. Should significant warming of the oceans occur their capacity to absorb CO2 will become significantly reduced, and if really high ocean temperatures are achieved they will become net exporter of CO2 to the atmosphere.

And, as has been discussed at length, there are numerous semi-sequestered forms of methane and carbon dioxide which are being desequestered by current levels of warming.

All the evidence indicates it is too late to slow down warming (not that anyone of significance is seriously attempting to do so).

I’ve sent his link off to a number of other people and will post it all as a blog entry.

“Doing the Math of Extinction”

A recent study showed the loss of Arctic albedo is a significant driver of warming:

“Loss of sea ice reduced northern polar albedo (reflectivity) by a total of 4% since 1980 which increased Arctic heat capture by an amazing 6.4 watts per meter squared (more than 4 times that of human CO2 forcing over the entire globe).” –link

“The total CO2 equivalent (CO2-eq) concentration of all long-lived GHGs is currently estimated to be about 455 ppm CO2-eq” (Solomon et al. 2007), as of 2005. These other contributors of GHGs include methane released from landfills, agriculture (especially from the digestive systems of grazing animals), nitrous oxide from fertilizers, gases used for refrigeration and industrial processes, the loss of forests that would otherwise store CO2, and from the melting of permafrost in the arctic. According to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report “These gases accumulate in the atmosphere, causing concentrations to increase with time. Significant increases in all of these gases have occurred in the industrial era”, and the increases have all been attributed to anthropogenic activities (Solomon et al. 2007).

Historically, through the rise and fall of temperatures over the last 800 thousand years, temperatures have risen first, then CO2 would increase, accelerating even more temperature rise until a maximum when both would then drop, creating a glacial period. Though CO2 levels over this period of time have not been the trigger for temperature rise and interglacial periods, they either have occurred at the same time or have led positive feedback global warming during the stages of deglaciation, greatly amplifying climate variations and increasing the global warming capacity due to the greenhouse effect (Shakun et al. 2012), (Solomon et al. 2007). What makes the present situation unpredictable to some extent is that never before has CO2 climbed so rapidly and so high, far ahead of temperature. Furthermore, this extra heat-trapping gas released into the atmosphere takes time to build up to its full effect, this is due to the delaying effect of the oceans as they catch up with the temperature of the atmosphere; deep bodies of water take longer to warm. There is a twenty five to thirty year time lag between CO2 being released into the atmosphere and its full heat-increasing potential taking effect. This means that most of the increase of global temperature rise observed thus far has not been caused by current levels of carbon dioxide but by levels that already have been in the atmosphere before the 1980’s. What is troublesome here is that these last three decades since then have seen the levels of greenhouse gases increase dramatically. On top of the current temperature rise we see now there is already another thirty years of accelerated warming built into the climate system.

Temperature

The Earth is warming and this time the trend is far from natural. The average temperature of the Earth’s surface has risen by 0.8 degrees Celsius since the late 1800s (Fig. 4). On a geologic timescale this swift increase is alarming. When temperatures have risen in the past, warming the planet at several points between ice ages, the average length of time this process has taken is roughly 5,000 years to increase global temperatures by 5 degrees. In this past century alone the temperature has risen ten times the average rate of ice age recovery warming, a recent trend not only driven by the rise of atmospheric CO2 concentrations, but also amplified by them.

The predicted rate of warming over the next 50-100 years is at the very least twenty times faster, potentially rising another 3-7 degrees Celsius before the year 2100 (Sokolov et al., 2009). Continued economic, global population and energy consumption growth over the next few decades will consequently increase not only CO2 emissions, but also the rate and quantity with which they accumulate in the atmosphere. This is a business-as-usual scenario where efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, namely CO2, have fallen short of any earnest mitigation, “locking in climate change at a scale that would profoundly and adversely affect all of human civilization and all of the world’s major ecosystems” (Allison et al. 2009…Even if the global mean temperature only rises another 2 degrees before the end of this century, it would be a larger increase in temperature rise than any century-long trend in the last 10,000 years. A one degree global temperature rise is also significant for the reason that it takes a vast amount of heat to warm all the oceans, atmosphere, and land by that much; even more so is the significance of subsequent ecosystem collapse in climate sensitive areas such as the Arctic due to such a rise.

Cities. As hot button a topic as population. Whenever I’ve made the point that this set of living arrangements is not sustainable (especially at this scale, but at any scale once they must go into other regions to allow them to continue) the push-back is truly full of vitriol and aggression. People take my comments so personally as if I really had the power to take away their play things.

I continue to hear (more from the left) the response that cities are more efficient. It’s as if they can’t do the math of what it takes to build and then maintain this.

Appreciated the mention of population and the links to WOA and the Disaffected Lib. The contents of both of those links complemented each other. I agree with Karen that numbers play the only role when you’ve got to feed each of those people, only in today’s world I don’t think you can so easily decouple consumption from the equation as Dis discusses in his piece.

I also am not sure what kind of role education plays. Is the goal of education to allow the woman to become part of the work force and another consumer? Is it to have skills and and an understanding of he world? is it to know that being a baby machine is not a healthy choice for any woman?

From a purely anecdotal perspective of the USA. Over the last 40 years I’ve seen more educated woman have upwards of 2 children. Calculating the impact on the planet from a consumptive perspective is mind blowing.

I think of Sally Fallon of Weston Price fame, who reminds me of Elmer Gantry, and her directing woman on the path of breeding. In her book Nourishing Traditions she calls those of us concerned with population, Population Reductionists (as if the human race is on the verge of extinction; she seems unconcerned with other species truly going extinct). She bemoans the massive infertility problem causing great suffering by woman. She’s educated, like most, if not all of her followers in the US, and she doesn’t see population contributing to the problems we’re facing. The message she’s giving is that if you don’t have babies you’re not a full human being and it’s being bought. Hey, if you give people what they want (tell them it’s okay to have babies) they will come.

Would it be completely insensitive of me to say that I chuckled at what you wrote? Perhaps I’m seeing humor where there isn’t any.

Yes, the truth would be very bad for them, but wouldn’t it set them free?

Also, I could swear as I read it I heard the high pitched voice of Butterfly McQueen, “I don’t know nothing about burning no babies, Miss Scarlet” while in the background the song “Disco Inferno” by the Tramps was playing.

The Keeling Curve record from the NOAA-operated Mauna Loa Observatory shows that the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration hovers around 400 ppm, a level not seen in more than 3 million years when sea levels were as much as 80 feet higher than today. Virtually every media outlet reported the passage of this climate milestone, but we suspect there’s more to the story. Oceans at MIT’s Genevieve Wanucha interviewed Ron Prinn, Professor of Atmospheric Science in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. Prinn is the Director of MIT’s Center for Global Change Science (CGCS) and Co-Director of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change (JPSPGC).

Prinn leads the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE), an international project that continually measures the rates of change of the air concentrations of 50 trace gases involved in the greenhouse effect. He also works with the Integrated Global System Model, which couples economics, climate physics and chemistry, and land and ocean ecosystems, to estimate uncertainty in climate predictions and analyze proposed climate policies.

What is so significant about this 400-ppm reading?

This isn’t the first time that the reading of 400 parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric CO2 was obtained. It was recorded at a NOAA’s observatory station in Barrow, Alaska, in May 2012. But the recent 400-ppm reading at Mauna Loa, Hawaii got into the news because that station produced the famous “Keeling Curve,” which is the longest continuous record of CO2 in the world, going back to 1958.‘400’ is just a round number. It’s more of a symbol than a true threshold of climate doom. The real issue is that CO2 keeps going up and up at about 2.1 ppm a year. Even though there was a global recession in which emissions were lower in most fully-developed countries, China, and to lesser extent India and Indonesia, blew right through and continued to increase their emissions.

Has anything gone unappreciated in the news coverage of this event?

Yes. What’s not appreciated is that there are a whole lot of other greenhouse gases (GHGs) that have fundamentally changed the composition of our atmosphere since pre-industrial times: methane, nitrous oxide, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), and hydrofluorocarbons. The screen of your laptop is probably manufactured in Taiwan, Japan, and Eastern China by a process that releases nitrogen trifluoride—release of 1 ton of nitrogen trifluoride is equivalent to 16,800 tons of CO2. But there is a fix to that—the contaminated air in the factory could be incinerated to destroy the nitrogen trifluoride before it’s released into the environment.

Many of these other gases are increasing percentage-wise faster than CO2 . In the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE), we continuously measure over 40 of these other GHGs in real time over the globe. If you convert these other GHGs into their equivalent amounts of CO2 that will have the same effect on climate, and add them to the NOAA measurements of CO2, you find that we are actually at 478 ppm of CO2 equivalents right now. In fact, we passed the 400 ppm back in about 1985. So, 478 not 400 is the real number to watch. That’s the number people should be talking about when it comes to climate change.

The non-CO2 GHGs are very powerful. One example is sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), which used to be in Nike shoes, and is now most widely used in the step-down transformers in long-distance electrical power grids. But SF6 leaks a lot, with 1 ton equivalent to 22,800 tons of CO2, and it’s increasing in our measurements. Another example is methane. We have been measuring methane for almost 30 years now, and it actually didn’t increase for almost 8 years from 1998 onwards, but we discovered in our network that it began to increase again in 2006. We published this finding in 2008, and ever since, methane has been rising at a rapid rate. Nitrous oxide, the third most important GHG, has been going up almost linearly since we started measuring it in 1978.

The worrisome thing is that almost all of these gases keep rising and, per ton, they are very powerful drivers of warming. Many of these GHGs have lifetimes of hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of years, so they are essentially in our atmosphere forever. There is almost nothing practical we can do to vacuum these gases out again.

…

What are the implications of the 478-ppm measurement to human life?

According to the paleoclimatological ice core record, if our planet warms more than 2 C globally (4 C at the poles), we are in trouble. That’s about 6 meters or 20 feet of sea level rise. Most of the world’s valuable infrastructure and high populations are along the coasts. So, the damage and cost of sea level rise alone is potentially very high. Other risky phenomena we face are shifting rainfall patterns that may move the locations of arable farmland out of the US and into Canada. Mexico could grow drier and drier, and there’s concern in the Department of Defense about potential challenges to the security at the southern US border. Other similarly vulnerable areas around the world could face desperate large-scale migrations of people seeking to find places to grow food.

These damages are likely to exceed significantly the costs associated with an efficient and fair GHG policy such as an emission tax whose revenues are used to offset income taxes.

The humor is that people don’t get it even thought it’s staring them right in the face. That we are in trouble right now this minute with .85oC eludes people.

I’m sure someone saw this a long time ago, but I just came across it today. “Liar, Liar, Why Deception is Our Way of Life” by Dorothy Rowe and it seemed apropos to why we say silly things. http://www.hazelden.org.uk/ref/ref014_lies.htm

I’m in a weird mood today after watching the video of Guy’s latest talk. I love those Q&As. Especially from those folk in the bargaining stage.

They keep asking when will climate change begin. I roll my eyes as Guy tells them the number of people already dying from it. But, hey they are warm and comfy where they are. There’s no sign of overflowing rivers outside THEIR homes or dried out reservoirs requiring THEM to ration water, or land so parched it cracks. They believe we still have time to make changes.

Two funny audience members: the production of fuel using algae so we can keep driving and the psychological research that says we need to talk about this stuff in a way that is positive so people will want to change.

Ha-ha, yes PMB I heard that too – what planet are they on? After the algae-produced gas guy went back to it after Guy’s remark I exclaimed: isn’t he listening? The psychologist was even more true to form – reverting to his “profession” with advice to Guy to get people to react and change (uh, little late for that doc). Amazing. Spell it out for them and they still don’t get it. This was one of the best talks I’ve heard of late – he even gets people to laugh!

I agree his last two talks were great. He’s keeping it to about 40 – 45 min to communicate much information to a mostly ignorant (however they are well schooled, I won’t say educated) audience. Then spends oodles of time interacting with the audience. I love the Q&A sections and wish the people video taping it would make sure the questions were recorded of have Guy repeat the question before responding. (I’ll communicate that on NBL).

Yes, people just don’t listen. They hear what they want and then want to keep saying it as if that will make it true.

Am reading a book called Messages which is about tools for better communicating. It s amazing that you can actually see and hear when people are not getting what was said and no attempt is made to clarify if what is being understood is what was being communicated.

The algae and psychology guy were prime examples during that event, but in the little I interact with the world these days they are not unique.

I went to the Do The Math site. Very interesting. Read the piece that was his response to that NYT op-ed piece “Why Population Is Not A Problem” Quite a lot of comments, but read through them all.

I’ll read his other posts over time as I like the topics.

I’m confused. Does Tom S. think we can navigate out of this? Does he feel the predictions of Peak Oil, Economic Collapse were 100% wrong because those early predictions were incorrect and therefore those making these statement can’t be relied on for information? This was the impression I got from reading the comments. Perhaps I was not clear that those comment belonged to the blog’s author.

The stable saucer analogy has humanity pushing the ball uphill, out of the stable saucer and over the rim into a different saucer which has conditions that are inhospitable to most (all?) vertebrate species.

In practice, pushing the ball uphill is the easiest thing in the world because all that is required is to be ignorant, stupid, and lazy, and get machines to do all the work. Couple the ignorance, stupidity and laziness with the corruption and lies of government and you have the recipe for meltdown.

The only course of action that would have a hope of saving anything resembling a civilization is the abandonment of capitalism and the adoption of a whole new socialist paradigm that reconfigures modes of production. As Ivan Mészáros correctly stated, “…the extermination of humankind is the ultimate concomitant of capital’s destructive course of development.”

We’ve already locked in warming of greater than 4C, as the CO2 equivalent of all GHG’s is now greater than 478ppm (as of summer 2013) and growing rapidly with positive feedback loops such as the loss of Arctic albedo, methane release from thawing tundra and deep ocean clathrates, changes in ocean chemistry, etc. Rising oceans, altered weather patterns, and consequent extreme drought/flooding from anthropogenic global warming will make the planet inhospitable for most life currently residing on Earth.

We continue with business-as-usual at our own peril while the true ‘long emergency’ of climate chaos” slowly unfolds.

“All it took was a single sample of frozen Siberian soil for an international collaboration of researchers to discover, and revive, a new type of “giant virus” — a virus whose unusually large size means scientists can spot it through a light microscope.

Indeed, despite being frozen for over 30,000 years, Pithovirus sibericum still packs a punch: a simple thawing procedure allowed it to infect a throng of unsuspecting single-cell organisms for the first time in thousands of years. And given that climate change is already causing the ground to thaw in regions such as the Arctic and parts of Alaska, scientists fear that this lab experiment could eventually take to the field, leading to the spontaneous revival of ancient and unknown viruses.”

Great cartoons Mike! I was going to suggest that now might be a good time to ask brave Abby about that interview we’d all like to have with her through you. She may have a bit of time to spare now. Apparently she’s being “reassigned” over her comments.

Russia Today anchor speaks out against invasion of Crimea, now faces assignment in Crimea
[quote]
During her editorial, Martin admitted that she doesn’t “know as much as I should about Ukraine’s history or the cultural dynamics of the region.” That may soon change — RT is shipping her to Crimea.

A vast hidden surveillance network runs across America, powered by the repo industry

Few notice the “spotter car” from Manny Sousa’s repo company as it scours Massachusetts parking lots, looking for vehicles whose owners have defaulted on their loans. Sousa’s unmarked car is part of a technological revolution that goes well beyond the repossession business, transforming any ­industry that wants to check on the whereabouts of ordinary people.

An automated reader attached to the spotter car takes a picture of every ­license plate it passes and sends it to a company in Texas that already has more than 1.8 billion plate scans from vehicles across the country.

These scans mean big money for Sousa — typically $200 to $400 every time the spotter finds a vehicle that’s stolen or in default — so he runs his spotter around the clock, typically adding 8,000 plate scans to the database in Texas each day.

“Honestly, we’ve found random apartment complexes and shopping ­plazas that are sweet spots” where the company can impound multiple vehicles, explains Sousa, the president of New England Associates Inc. in Bridgewater.

But the most significant impact of Sousa’s business is far bigger than locating cars whose owners have defaulted on loans: It is the growing database of snapshots showing where Americans were at specific times, information that everyone from private detectives to ­insurers are willing to pay for.

While public debate about the license reading technology has centered on how police should use it, business has eagerly adopted the $10,000 to $17,000 scanners with remarkably few limits.

At least 10 repossession companies in Massachusetts say they mount the scanners on spotter cars or tow trucks, and Digital Recognition Network of Fort Worth, Texas, claims to collect plate scans of 40 percent of all US vehicles annually.

This is interesting when combined with all the other “banker suicides” lately:

The startup community has lost one of its own. Autumn Radtke, CEO of First Meta, a Singapore-based virtual currency trading platform that also deals in bitcoin, has died last night, Tech in Asia has learned. She was 28 years old.

The circumstances surrounding the death is unclear. Sources have suggested that she committed suicide, although police investigations are still ongoing. [there’s a little more]

Finally, just so all the “normal” people can think about the way things are while they still have jobs and can buy food in packages:

Food packaging chemicals may be harmful to human health over long term

More research needed into impact of chemical constituents leaching into foodstuffs

The synthetic chemicals used in the packaging, storage, and processing of foodstuffs might be harmful to human health over the long term, warn environmental scientists in a commentary in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

This is because most of these substances are not inert and can leach into the foods we eat, they say.

Despite the fact that some of these chemicals are regulated, people who eat packaged or processed foods are likely to be chronically exposed to low levels of these substances throughout their lives, say the authors.

And far too little is known about their long term impact, including at crucial stages of human development, such as in the womb, which is “surely not justified on scientific grounds,” the authors claim.

They point out that lifelong exposure to food contact materials or FCMs – substances used in packaging, storage, processing, or preparation equipment – “is a cause for concern for several reasons.”

These include the fact that known toxicants, such as formaldehyde, a cancer causing substance, are legally used in these materials. Formaldehyde is widely present, albeit at low levels, in plastic bottles used for fizzy drinks and melamine tableware.

Secondly, other chemicals known to disrupt hormone production also crop up in FCMs, including bisphenol A, tributyltin, triclosan, and phthalates.

“Whereas the science for some of these substances is being debated and policy makers struggle to satisfy the needs of stakeholders, consumers remain exposed to these chemicals daily, mostly unknowingly,” the authors point out.

And, thirdly, the total number of known chemical substances used intentionally in FCMs exceeds 4000.

Furthermore, potential cellular changes caused by FCMs, and in particular, those with the capacity to disrupt hormones, are not even being considered in routine toxicology analysis, which prompts the authors to suggest that this “casts serious doubts on the adequacy of chemical regulatory procedures.”

They admit that establishing potential cause and effect as a result of lifelong and largely invisible exposure to FCMs will be no easy task, largely because there are no unexposed populations to compare with, and there are likely to be wide differences in exposure levels among individuals and across certain population groups.

But some sort of population-based assessment and biomonitoring are urgently needed to tease out any potential links between food contact chemicals and chronic conditions like cancer, obesity, diabetes, neurological and inflammatory disorders, particularly given the known role of environmental pollutants, they argue.

“Since most foods are packaged, and the entire population is likely to be exposed, it is of utmost importance that gaps in knowledge are reliably and rapidly filled,” they urge.

CIA Goes to EXTREME Lengths to Cover Up Its Illegal and Counter-Productive Acts

[selected quotes from the article presented here]

A devastating and secret report by the Senate Intelligence Committee documents in detail how the C.I.A.’s brutalization of terror suspects during the Bush years was unnecessary, ineffective, and deceptively sold to Congress, the White House, Justice Department, and the public.

The CIA has long fought to keep the report secret.

That’s not surprising, given that torture is wholly illegal (and see this).

And that the CIA’s torture program ended up deceiving the 9/11 Commission. Specifically, the 9/11 Commission Report was largely based on third-hand accounts of what tortured detainees said, with two of the three parties in the communication being government employees. The 9/11 Commissioners were not allowed to speak with the detainees, or even their interrogators. Instead, they got their information third-hand. The Commission itself didn’t really trust the interrogation testimony … yet published it as if it were Gospel.

New York Times investigative reporter Philip Shenon Newsweek noted in a 2009 essay in Newsweek that the 9/11 Commission Report was unreliable because most of the information was based on the statements of tortured detainees.

[and]

Spying On Its Overseers In Washington

In the last 24 hours, the New York Times and McClatchy have published stories revealing that the CIA is spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee, as part of its efforts to block release of its torture report.

McClatchy reports:

The CIA Inspector General’s Office has asked the Justice Department to investigate allegations of malfeasance at the spy agency in connection with a yet-to-be released Senate Intelligence Committee report into the CIA’s secret detention and interrogation program, McClatchy has learned.

The criminal referral may be related to what several knowledgeable people said was CIA monitoring of computers used by Senate aides to prepare the study. The monitoring may have violated an agreement between the committee and the agency.

The development marks an unprecedented breakdown in relations between the CIA and its congressional overseers amid an extraordinary closed-door battle over the 6,300-page report on the agency’s use of waterboarding and harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists held in secret overseas prisons. The report is said to be a searing indictment of the program. The CIA has disputed some of the reports findings.

Tech Dirt argues:

In many ways, the idea that the CIA is directly spying on the Senate Committee charged with its own oversight is a bigger potential scandal than many of the Snowden NSA revelations so far.

We partially agree … although the NSA has also been spying on (and perhaps even blackmailing) its “overseers” in Washington.

On his watch, the CIA has been permitted to keep secret a report on its own misconduct, even as misleading information was released to the public.

President Obama is complicit in suppressing the truth about CIA torture of prisoners. That’s clear from the fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee’s $40 million, 6,000-page torture report is still being suppressed 15 months after being adopted. It is made clearer still by a scathing letter that one member of the committee, Senator Mark Udall, sent the White House on Tuesday. Its claims are jaw-dropping.

Udall wants the torture report released to the public as fully and quickly as possible. He is also interested in a separate CIA report about torture of prisoners. His letter makes all of the following charges:
•Lots of information already given to the public about the CIA’s torture program, its management, and its effectiveness “is misleading and inaccurate.”
•The Obama Administration itself has declassified and publicly released torture information that “contains inaccurate characterizations of CIA programs.”
•The CIA’s internal review of its torture program contradicts what it told the oversight committee.
•The CIA is erecting “impediments and obstacles” to its overseers.

Finally, and perhaps most alarmingly, Udall cryptically writes to Obama, “As you are aware, the CIA has recently taken unprecedented action against the Committee in relation to the internal CIA review, and I find these actions to be incredibly troubling for the Committee’s oversight responsibilities and for our democracy.”

What does it mean for the CIA to take “unprecedented action” against its overseers?

Udall tells the president that he knows they share “a commitment to transparency and the rule of law.” That clearly gives Obama too much credit. On torture, Obama has violated the law. And his commitment to transparency is illusory—in fact, he has amassed a historically bad record on that issue.

But Udall is correct when he writes that “the American people deserve a proper and accurate accounting of the history, management, operation, and effectiveness of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.” It remains absurd that Obama keeps allowing the very agency exposed in that report to vet and suppress it.

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OWS knows who really pulls the strings

"...the megawealthy and Washington have become so symbiotic as to be a single entity. Indeed, Occupy's best move, as conservative blogger/financier Gregory Djerejian noted at TheAtlantic.com, was "directing their ire squarely toward the real elites of the country, rather than their bought-and-paid marionettes sitting in Washington."

Preserving the Status Quo

There is no right wing or left wing, only the aristocracy and the serfs (a vertical paradigm).
To know this is to be like a fish who has broken the surface of the water, realizing he was in water the whole time.

A Kabuki Play

"What we have, in what passes for US democracy in 2012, is a kabuki play that Cicero put to papyrus 1948 years earlier. All historical empires and war aggressors have used propaganda to claim their looting and police states were necessary and helpful to the 99%. Instead, a sorrowful history tells us they were almost always for the sole benefit of the 1%."
- Albert Bates

Professor Rick Wolff explains why growth has become a focus of our modern political system. He describes how inequality is created by the way our enterprises are organized. Because a significant portion of our lives are at work, how would our society look if democratic businesses became the new normal? What would be the environmental and social implications […]

The Firefly Gathering offers a wide range of classes for adults and children on primitive skills, permaculture, nature connection, and eco-homesteading that are designed to be able to be applied to enhance everyday life. The gathering gathers a bevy of inspiring, amazing people. Besides classes it offers evening entertainment, basic infrastructure, and on-si […]